29 Feb
2020
29 Feb
'20
4:20 a.m.
On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 4:58 PM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
Sure, but then DEC Field Circus won't touch the box.
That's not true. All our UNIX systems at UCB and CMU had DEC field service
on them and we had lots of non-DEC HW, including memory, disk and disk
controllers. Funny, the DEC knew we could swap memory chips on the
National Semiconductor memory board for the Vax. Which we could not do
with the DEC boards, they had to be swapped.
The same was true at BTL, in fact and at Bell, there were DEC folks
on-site. They might occasionally gripe, but we used to joke about it. It
probably helped in all these places we had more than multiple systems and
the field offices knew better. If we called, it was busted.
Heh heh :-) I don't think I've ever seen RS-232 used "properly"
i.e.
implementing DSR/DTR or RTS/CTS for other than flow control etc, and using
the secondary pins as well.
Maybe you never saw a serial RJE station or I suspect a serial line that
was fully synchronous running one of the IBM protocols. That was sort of
where I started to learn in the late 1960s. I saw IBM systems before I saw
the DEC ones and IBM used all the wires. Eventually, I got a copy of the
wonderful DEC press book from John McNamara, called "Technical Aspects of
Data Communications."
Then I learned about UNIX, which came from AT&T which used all that stuff
in their modems and data communications gear.